Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Online Communities, learn form the best!

The Community Roundtable recently released"The State of Community Management 2014", for all of you managing internal or external communities, or considering to create one this is simply gold! read carefully and leverage the hard earned learning that wonderful community practitioners are willing to share with you! Here a few golden nuggets to entice your appetite:

Community Process maturity (stated - clearly communicated, consistent, inclusive) renders business value (notice they don't say Community maturity... newer Communities that leverage these best practices can achieve process maturity in a shortened time-frame). Of those with mature processes 85% can measure business value versus 48% for the average community.

Multi-tiered advocacy and engagement programs drive higher member engagement rates (up to 46% of members contributing), but it does require resources (average of 7.5 Community Managers versus 1.4-2.6 for those with informal or no programs).

72% of Communities have an approved strategy, however only 40% of those are operational and measurable and 50% have a corresponding resource roadmap approved..

A well defined and guarded Community Culture makes a difference on Business Value: Communities that can measure business value are 8% chattier, 9% more proactive and 10% more structured.

Communities with consistent scheduled content and programming have better engagement; both of these should include member collaboration.

Policies: enabling policies (the behaviors you want) are as important as outlining the restricting policy (the behaviors you don't want).

Technology platform does matter: platforms that can integrate across channels where the Community interacts have a higher engagement rate and ability to measure business value.